Recently, a friend told me about a t-shirt she saw on a little boy. It said, “Anything Dad can do, Mom can do better.” I wasn’t at all surprised. That’s the kind of world we live in now. We want a world of strong women, of gender equality, of real feminism. We want a better world for our daughters, a world that will treat them fairly, where a girl will only be limited by her own thoughts, fears, or lack of ambition. And if that was all we wanted, I’d want that world for my daughter, too. But that’s not all there is to the modern women’s world.

We want strong women and we wrongly create them by making weak men. To achieve equality, we’ve forced sameness. We want feminism, but only the kind that encourages women to “have it all,” even when they don’t want to. That’s the modern world we live in, and I worry about my daughter living in it. But I worry about my son more. It’s not easy raising a son in this girls’ world, but here are a few lessons every boy still needs to learn.